It sounds like you just got unlucky. Western Digital should replace your drive for free, but what a pain!

I realize I'm a couple of months late on this but I don't believe it's bad luck on Matt's fault. I worked for tech support at a college a year back and saw many hp's come in with this same problem.

The consensus that myself and the other techs came up with is that it's a design problem on HP's part. I can't recall if the dv9000 is the same way but others I have seen have the hard drive(s) placed in the front where most people rest their palms. The structural support there isn't usually enough to prevent the pressure from that from contacting the hard drive. Given enough time and depending on how much you rest your hands/how much pressure you put there, it could cause contact between the shell of the hard drive and the read/write arm and cause damage.

We were able to replicate this with another hard drive and laptop and did end up notifying HP that we were seeing this problem.

no its not bad luck its the hp I have had 3 go bad in a little over one year and a friend had two go bad. no more hp's in my house that is for sure/

Along with Mark's answer, check your environment and also that no other component within the computer is causing these failures, eg. fan not working.

Being a computer tech, this is an extremely common problem I deal with on a daily basis. The most common causes for a Hard Disk Drive failure are from never shutting down the computer or moving your computer (traveling) without turning off your computer. I have also noticed that the reliability of Western Digital drives are no where near Seagate. If HDD's are going out every few months and you don't really move the computer that often, that could be a sign that the controller on the motherboard may be failing, or causing the drives themselves to go bad.

Solid State Drives are a completely non mechanic alternative to the HDD. They hold less information at a higher cost, but are insanely faster.

More than likely just bad luck, but remember magnets can cause a Hard Drive to fail so insure there's nothing magnetic near the laptop.

Bad luck... I have purchased a new HD for my HP dv2550se, changing the 160 GB for a brand new of 500 GB. This change I made, was because I need more space, the 160 GB HD in now external.

I had two HD Failures in my Dell, I finally changed HD Brand to Seagate and the problem has not resurfaced. If I remember right Dell was supplying Hitachi Drives. I have not had a failure in many years with either WD or Seagate drives.

I am　on my fourth hard-drive on a Tosh 3D Windows 7 x64 laptop in 18 months. I cannot understand why my 5-year old vista laptop is still working fine.

3 hard drives turned to a black mess and would not restore or boot or nothing. I wasted? HUNDREDS of hours trying to fix the problems and around 400 gigabytes of loss of data.

If I didnt know any better? I would think it is a virus destroying the partitions from NTFS to RAW. I suspect the hard-drive repair companies rouge staff or pushing a virus or two out there.

I am just passing through dudes...